Forty five million poor people in the USA

This video from the USA says about itself:

Child Poverty Has Risen to 16 Million in the United States of America

20 March 2011

60 Minutes did a piece on children in Florida.

In this country the debate is about how much money are we going to cut from programs that feed these kids. Not whether or not we are going to. How much! Is it just to finance the tax cuts for millionaires while raising a generation of kids living in poverty?

According to CBS and the U.S. Census, 14 million children throughout the nation lived in poverty before the recession hit, and now that number is 16 million — a 2-million person rise in two years. via — Lori Kozlowski L.A. Times.

By Andre Damon in the USA:

Forty five million in poverty in the US

17 September 2014

Forty-five million people are living in poverty in the United States, according to figures released Tuesday by the Census Bureau. The 2013 Income and Poverty in the United States report found that the number of people in poverty remained at a record high last year, while the income of a typical household remained stagnant. According to the Census figures, the median household income in the US has fallen 8 percent since 2007. …

The report follows the publication earlier this month of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which found that between 2007 and 2013, the income of a typical US household fell 12 percent. According to the survey, the median American household now earns $6,400 less per year than it did in 2007.

The poverty threshold, which currently stands at $23,624 for a family of four with two children, or $12,119 for an individual without children, is abysmally low. Using this measure, the latest Census Bureau report finds that the official poverty rate fell by .5 percent, to 14.5 percent, the first fall in the poverty rate since 2006. While the poverty rate fell, the total number of people in poverty remained at the same level as the year before.

One in five children in the US were in poverty in 2013, and the child poverty rate stood at 19.9 percent in 2013, down from 21.8 percent the year before.

The stagnation of real wages shown in 2013 is part of an ongoing decline in workers’ wages. According to an analysis of the Census figures by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the inflation-adjusted median earnings for a man in 1973 was $52,419, higher than the present figure of $50,033. According to the EPI’s data, “the decline in median non-elderly household income from 2000 to 2013” was $7,337, or 11.2 percent.

According to the Census figures, while the Gini coefficient, a measure of social inequality, increased 4.9 percent from 1993 through 2012, it remained largely unchanged in 2013. …

The Census figures do not reflect a series of drastic cuts to social spending that were implemented in 2013, including elements of the “sequester” budget cuts, $11 billion in cuts to food stamp benefits, and the expiration of federal extended jobless benefits at the end of the year. These draconian spending cuts together removed tens of millions of dollars in income from the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the population.

The Census report follows the publication of a number of social indicators showing growing poverty and social distress in the US. In April, Feeding America published its annual report on hunger, which showed that 49 million people, or 16 percent of the population, lived in food insecure households in 2012, up from 11.1 percent in 2007. The level of food insecurity among children is even worse, affecting 16 million children, or 21.6 percent of all children in the US.

The collapse of workers’ incomes and the growth of inequality express the basic response of the ruling class to the economic crisis that erupted in 2008. …

As a result of these policies, the top 1 percent of income earners in the US took in 95 percent of all income gains between 2009 and 2012.

‘THE WORKING POOR’S LIFELONG LOSING GAME’ “They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. If that’s true, the following 10 images could provide the lyrics for a thousand blues songs. The graphs are taken from series of recent reports which, when considered together, create a paint-by-numbers picture of the lifelong losing game faced by working Americans.” [HuffPost]